The United States and the United Kingdom are in a competition right now to see which system is capable of producing elections with the worst choice of candidates who are in every conceivable way unfit for public office. I contend that the US is winning, but perhaps that’s just my national ethnocentrism. The June 27th US clown show—called a “presidential debate”—is the latest evidence in support of my America First claim.
The “debate” was a competition between senile incoherence and a string of bizarre lies. Britain at least has more than two options of scoundrels, fools, and dangerous loons. Point to America again!
How did we come to a point where not a single head of state or aspirant for said position has the slightest clue about what is actually happening in the world around them? And how did we come to the point where electorates are forced to choose between tools and narcissists when the majority—of any ideological stripe—are unhappy with these seemingly inevitable “choices”?
It seems the best we can hope for—speaking now, along with my wife, as retirees on a fixed income—is that the currency doesn’t collapse, the government doesn’t collapse, that inflation doesn’t continue to eat into our diminished purchasing power, that there’s not a nuclear war, and that we’re safely dead before the coming climate apocalypse.
More than once I’ve said—having noted for some time now that political leaders appears to be packs of midwit-to-nitwit narcissists or robotic corporate sychophants—that the leadership doesn’t matter nearly as much as many might think . . . or hope. The whole shebang is running on inertia. Leadership decisions are mostly shots in the dark or kicking problems further down the road for the next guys. The scary part is that most of these leaders will make mass human sacrifices to sustain their shitty political careers, and that they have neither the discernment nor the foresight to judge how their self-serving thrusts and parries will ramify for the rest of us, including our children and grandchildren.
How are others feeling? (I left that blank in the title, because everyone enjoys a good monocausal explanation.)
There's no way to spin Biden's debate performance. I doubt Biden will be able to withstand the calls for him to step-aside which are coming from all across the non-Trump political spectrum.